Saturday 7 September 2013

Few Rules for Startup Entrepreneur-Developers - we believe in

  1. Focus on customer's interaction with your product over technology being used. Nobody cares about which language/framework/... you use, as long as your solution works for your customers.
  2. Sharpen your tools/skills before you cut the code. If you are comfortable with a piece of technology, and productive with a stack, stick with it. Ignore the thrill of building new stuff in a language to impress your peers.
  3. Never use new technology/framework/... - many of them will die before they will become useful - Exception is if the technology is going to improve your value proposition. In that case, you should try to improve it to fit you needs - If this is an Open Source project - share it back with the community, it is a true win-win for everyone.
  4. Keep the whole software architecture modular and replaceable. You will be paying it forward and it will save you money in the future.
  5. Keep the server processing to the bare minimum needed - this will help you scale efficiently. With AJAX on browser and powerful mobile devices you can do much of the hard work on clients rather than on the server. The only bottleneck is the overflow of data being sent over the wire, but its a small price to pay. 
  6. Optimize only when you need to scale - only fix what is broken.
This is a living document, and might change over time. Much of the learning presented here has been from our own experience running start-ups, helping other start-ups and businesses. 

Monday 6 August 2012

Social Media Madness

I have been seeing social media madness going around in friendly business circles these days.

Here are a few questions you need to ask before you jump in and commit your marketing dollars:
  1. Will your social media presence bring in new customers???
  2. Does it create awareness of your product or services?
  3. What is unique about your social media strategy???
  4. How will it make your customers stick???
  5. How will you convert their "Likes" into sales?
Success of a social media strategy by its very nature is hard to measure - in other words, its a hard problem to solve.??Its not to say, its not do-able, it just needs the right context.

Monday 11 June 2012

Secure Boot - time for new hardware players

I have always used Linux. Suffice to say, its the best environment for software development. 

If there is a move by hardware manufacturers to stop us from installing Linux on our machines - we are not going to buy from them. It's that simple.

This creates an opportunity for new hardware manufacturers to fill the gap in the market.